I hear all electricity has been cut off. Grass in Yorkshire.
October 25: F came aboard with the other scientists and immediately wanted to know why we didnt set sail. I asked her if her work could be carried on any more easily at sea. She shrugged her shoulders. I pointed out that only rats leave a sinking ship and England was far from overcome. She favored me with one of her fixed stares.
"You are dithery, Weener. Your epigrams have lost their jaunty air of discovery and your face is almost green."
"You would not expect me to remain unaffected by the events around us, Miss Francis."
"Wouldnt I?" she retorted incomprehensibly and went below to her cabin-laboratory.
The Grass is reported in Essex and Hertfordshire. I understand there are at least two other ships equipped for research and manned by English scientists. It would serve F right if they perfected a counteragent first.
October 26: Have ordered our accompanying ships to lie offshore, lest they be boarded by fearcrazed refugees, for the Grass is now in the vicinity of London and England is in a horrible state.
October 27: BBC transmitting from Penzance. Faint.
101. November 3: On board the Sisyphus off Scilly. The last days of England have passed. Heightening the horror, the BBC in its final moments forwent its policy of soothing its listeners and urging calmness upon them. Instead, it organized an amazing news service, using thousands of pigeons carrying messages from eyewitnesses to the station at Penzance to give a minutebyminute account of the end. Dispassionately and detachedly, as though this were some ordinary disaster, announcer after announcer went on the air and read reports; heartpiercing, anticlimactic, tragic, trivial, noble and thoroughly English reports....
The people vented their futile rage and terror in mass pyromania. Building after building, city after city was burned to the ground. But, according to the BBC, the murderous frenzy of the Continent was not duplicated. Inanimate things suffered; priceless art objects were kicked around in the streets, but houses were carefully emptied of inhabitants before being put to the torch.